Personal profile

Matthew is a specialist on mid-twentieth century British cinema and audiences. He is particularly interested in the relationship between cinema and memory, popular film and television genres, and the social experience of cinema-going. He holds a British Academy Rising Stars Engagement Awards grant on ‘Cinema, Memory and the Community’ and his next monograph, ‘Science Fiction Cinema and 1950s Britain: Recontextualising the Golden Age’ will be published by Bloomsbury in 2017. He has worked with colleagues at UCL on a major AHRC-funded project, ‘Cultural Memory and British Cinema-going of the 1960s’ and is currently co-authoring a monograph on this topic. He also produced an immersive theatre experience to deliver public impact from this research. With Dr Joan Ormrod (Manchester Metropolitan University) he has edited a collection of essays on time travel narratives in various media formats.

‘Parallel Worlds: Investigating Gendered Audience Responses to the Double in Parallel World Science Fiction Television’. Southwest and Texas Popular Culture and American Culture Associations conference. February 2008. Albuquerque, New Mexico.

Professional esteem indicators

Curated two exhibitions at Leicester’s Heritage Centre on Hammer Film Productions and the history of cinema-going in the city. October 2016 – May 2017.

Organisation of two large immersive theatre events informed by my research on 1960s cinema-going. Picturehouse Central, London and Phoenix, Leicester. March and June 2016.

Lecture and screening of Pleasure Domes and Flea Pits: Leicester’s Cinema History (2015), a documentary film that I produced which emerged from my research on the history of Leicester cinema-going. Directed by Kieran Chauhan.